Re: Seeking a KVM benchmark

Gleb Natapov
2014-11-10T17:38:43Z

On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 06:28:25PM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> On 10/11/2014 15:23, Avi Kivity wrote:
> > It's not surprising [1]. Since the meaning of some PTE bits change [2],
> > the TLB has to be flushed. In VMX we have VPIDs, so we only need to flush
> > if EFER changed between two invocations of the same VPID, which isn't the
> > case.
> >
> > [1] after the fact
> > [2] although those bits were reserved with NXE=0, so they shouldn't have
> > any TLB footprint
>
> You're right that this is not that surprising after the fact, and that
> both Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge have VPIDs (even the non-Xeon ones).
> This is also why I'm curious about the Nehalem.
>
> However note that even toggling the SCE bit is flushing the TLB. The
> NXE bit is not being toggled here! That's the more surprising part.
>
Just a guess, but may be because writing EFER is not something that happens
often in regular OSes it is not optimized to handle different bits differently.

--
Gleb.